turncoat: in defense of andromeda tonks nee black
The day after Andromeda’s world ended, she woke to a house full of life.
She rolled out of bed in soft pajamas, bare feet. One pillow was mussed and crumpled. The other was untouched, plumped just the way Ted liked it. She leaned against the headboard, pale fingers gone paler from squeezing the wood.
Her knees were creaking, her joints aching. She was forty three and she felt like she had at least a century brittling her bones. Morning light, grey and dim, dropped through the crack in the curtains, shattered to the floor. There was a sniffle. There was a crescendo of an infant’s cry. Andromeda wrapped an old blanket around her shoulders and went to her grandson.
If she had picked up the newspaper on her front step (she wouldn’t) she would have seen the garbled headlines first trying to make sense of the smoldering remains of the Battle of Hogwarts. THE END OF OUR TERROR? the Prophet screamed.
When Andromeda went out into the rest of the house with Teddy nestled into her shoulder, she had to step cautiously over sleeping bodies. In one corner, a boy with disheveled hair and crooked glasses was passed out on her living room floor, wrapped around a lithe redhead. Harry had insisted on coming to tell her about Nymphadora and Remus in person. The rest of the snorers on her floor had insisted on coming with him. Andromeda had insisted that if they tried to leave again in that state, exhausted and unfed, they’d end up passed out in a ditch somewhere and not just because she’d send a curse after them.
She didn’t know them yet. She didn’t know Harry would spend hours on all fours when Teddy was learning to crawl, demonstrating proper form, while Ginny laughed and cheered them both on with Lee Jordan-style commentary. She didn’t know Molly Weasley would fold herself bossily, comfortably, into Andromeda’s Saturday afternoons with teacakes and preserves, her mending and her sharpest gossip, kindest words.
Andromeda didn’t know that the bushy haired girl curled up on the couch would teach Teddy to read, buy him Muggle science books and help him make a potato battery for a lightbulb, that the lanky redhead bent like a long-limbed question mark at the foot of the couch would become Andromeda’s newest, brightest chess arch nemesis.
Little Teddy on one shoulder, Andromeda went barefoot into the kitchen to get down her daughter’s favorite mug and fill it full of steaming tea. Andromeda let it overbrew, watching sleeping chests, backs, ribs, stomachs rise and fall, breathe, shake. When she finally rolled the bitter liquid over her tongue, she clung to the mug, didn’t let it break the silence.
